ANOOP MADHUSUDANAN

SignalWire is an experimental Server<->Client plumbing project I started, that magically wires up your HTML5 front end to the collections/tables in your data store or ORM, and I just pushed the first commit to Github. SignalWire uses SignalR and Roslyn libraries to implement features like

Exposing collections in your Back end directly over the wire for CRUD operations and for performing LINQ queries from your JavaScript.

Enable using C# in your HTML applications.

I got inspired by Meteor and started SignalWire as a POC to implement some of these features on the .NET stack, but I’ve got few more ideas on the way and thought about pushing this to Github. See the codebase in Github

Check out this quick video (no sound, sorry), a simple Taskboard built using SignalWire. See how we are accessing the collections in Javascript, and check how we are issuing LINQ queries

As of now, support is available for EntityFramework and MongoDb as the back end. Also, it provides

A light weight permission framework (wip)

A Client side Javascript API to access your collections with minimal/no serverside code

LINQ support to issue Linq queires from HTML pages (highly experimental, as of now no sandboxing support per caller)

C# code in your HTML pages (wip)

How To Start

You may start with Creating an Empty ASP.NET Project in Visual Studio 2012 (You need .NET 4.5 as we are using Roslyn September CTP libraries). Then, install SignalWire using Nuget. In Package Manager console

Install-Package SignalWire

This will add the following components to your project.

Models\TaskDb.cs - An example Entity Framework Data Context. You can use your instead

Hubs\DataHub.cs - An example Datahub.

Scripts\SignalWire.js - Clientside JQuery Pluin for SignalR.

Now, goto Index.html, and verify all your JS file versions are correct. Run the application and see

Server – Data Context and Hub

The Only server side code you need is your POCO objects and a hub inherited from the DataHub base class, which is defined in the SignalWire library. You need to use the Collections attribute to map a POCO class with the set/collection, and make sure you always do that in lower case.

Now, you need a hub. By convention, Wire assume’s the server hub’s name as Data if it is not specified in the init method of $.wire.init(..). In the example you get when you install the Nuget package, you’ll see we are using an Entity Framework Context Provider, for TaskDb which is a DataContext. Replace TaskDb with your own EF Data context if required. Once you do that, all your collections/sets with in the context can be accessed over the wire. In the example, you’ve only on set in your TaskDb data context as you can see above - that is Tasks. Let us create the Hub.

public class Data : DataHub<EFContextProvider<TaskDb>>

That's all you need to access collections via the Wire.

Client - Initializing and Issuing Queries

SignalWire magically exposes all your Tables/Sets/Collections in your Data back end via the $.wire Javascript object at client side. You can initialize $.wire using the init() method, which returns a JQuery Deferred. Here is a quick example regarding initializing Wire and issuing a LINQ query.

$.wire.yourcollection.update(item) to update an item (based on Id match).

$.wire.yourcollection.read({"query":"expression", "skip":"xxx", "take":"xxx"}) to read from a specific collection

Permissions

You can decorate your Model classes with Custom permission attributes that implements IPermission. This will check if the user in the current context can actually perform a specific operation on a Model entity.

What's More

I'm planning the following features based on my time

Sandboxed execution for C# scripts in HTML page that can access client side context